The Current State and Future of Web3 Infrastructure

The core concept of Web3 is to enable users to truly own and control their own data and assets. Blockchain technology is one of the key components in achieving this goal. With the evolution from Web1 to Web3, the amount of data has exploded. Data has become the most important primitive, carrying key information such as identity, assets, and interaction history. The processing of data has given rise to two core fields: storage and computation. Therefore, blockchain projects focused on data, storage, and computation form an important cornerstone of Web3.

Current State of Web3 Infrastructure

Although some once high-profile projects like Filecoin, Arweave, and Dfinity have passed their peak hype period, they are still under active development. In terms of development activity, ecosystem richness, and social media updates, these projects maintain a development activity level comparable to Ethereum, with a considerable number of ecosystem applications covering various fields such as storage, NFTs, gaming, and DeFi. This indicates that the Web3 infrastructure is becoming more robust, but the main challenge it faces is how to achieve broader adoption.

Data: The Primitives of Web3

In the Web3 era, data has the characteristic of being open source, no longer monopolized by centralized platforms, but rather able to flow freely. This grants data greater composability potential. However, the openness of data also brings privacy issues. Some data protocols emphasize providing privacy protection for users through encryption technology while unlocking the value of data. For example, Sismo protects user privacy through ZK badges.

Data protocols are often middleware between DAPPs, making it easy to form network effects. Chainlink and The Graph have achieved a high market share and brand effect through extensive collaboration with other DAPPs.

Development Strategy of Storage Public Chain

Distributed storage projects such as Filecoin, Storj, and Arweave have entered a consolidation phase, continuously improving developer tools, attracting more project integrations, and exploring richer ecosystems, innovations, and business models.

The characteristics of these projects include: token incentives as a core element; decentralized storage resource provision; adopting different competitive strategies ( such as Arweave focusing on permanent storage, Filecoin concentrating on short-term on-demand storage ); following market trends ( such as providing NFT storage services ). Some excellent storage public chains are innovating based on market trends rather than sticking to existing business models.

Public Blockchain: Pursuing Higher Adoption

The market shows enormous demand, and high-performance public chains are highly anticipated. Projects like Near, Dfinity, Aptos, and Sui have all raised over one hundred million dollars. These public chains achieve high TPS through innovative consensus mechanisms, with some projects targeting a TPS as high as 100,000 transactions per second.

Despite good financing conditions, strong technological capabilities, and a considerable number of ecological DAPPs, high-performance public chains have still not achieved true widespread adoption. Compared to Ethereum, their ecosystems are relatively quiet, lacking sufficient user retention and blockbuster DAPPs.

These public chains may need to maintain greater inclusivity towards popular projects and new gameplay, focusing on nurturing and promoting flagship projects, and even proposing new gameplay and concepts. Only by increasing user and DAPP participation can technological strength be fully realized.

Application chains may become the development trend of the next generation of high-performance public chains. Application chains focused on specific areas ( such as EVM compatibility, privacy, multi-chain interoperability, NFTs, etc. ) are easier to form characteristics, establish brand image, and achieve a certain degree of "scalability" effect.

Future Outlook

The Web3 ecosystem is still in the "fat protocol, thin application" development stage. There is still significant room for improvement in infrastructure, which has not yet entered a critical development phase. At this stage, Web3 infrastructure will continue to capture more industry value ahead of applications.

In the future, as on-chain data becomes richer, storage networks will provide more economical and flexible solutions, privacy networks and protocols will effectively protect sensitive information, and computing public chains will balance performance, decentralization, and participation. Data will achieve cross-chain interoperability, allowing Web3 to better support various applications.

When real-life users, assets, businesses, entertainment games, and social interactions truly enter the Web3 world, a decentralized, free, and rich Web3 ecosystem can be considered truly formed.